Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, says teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming' is just one of a number of problems with the standards. 'I think Wyoming can do far better.' Wyoming Governor Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a 'war on coal' and has said that he's skeptical about man-made climate change. Supporters of the NGSS say science standards for Wyoming schools haven't been updated since 2003 and are six years overdue. 'If you want the best science education for your children and grandchildren and you don't want any group to speak for you, then make yourselves heard loud and clear,' says Cate Cabot. 'Otherwise you will watch the best interests of Wyoming students get washed away in the hysteria of a small anti-science minority driven by a national right wing group – and political manipulation.'"

It's called 'motivated reasoning', but I doubt these idiots have ever heard of it.

Must be a conservative state, because this peculiar strain of stupidity is generally right-wing in nature. It's all about me! me!! me!! and screw the consequences, especially for the environment, our grandkids, or poor people.

Don't forget ideology. Get ready to read a bunch of posts from people who pride themselves on being scientific, but reject a theory that enjoys more support in climatology than the Standard Model does in physics. Just because they're conservative and it would be inconvenient for their politics.

I think this example has less to do with the actual Climate debate, than it does with good, old fashioned, Don't bite the hand that feeds you, company-town loyalty.

FWIW, I grew up in a small town where my father, uncles, and friend's parents worked in a local mill. Three quarters all the jobs in this town were at that mill, in addition to almost all the good paying ones; and hell, they had a softball league and gave us each a turkey at Thanksgiving.

Couple years ago the University of Wyoming took down a large sculpture on campus well before its planned exhebition run was done because the oil industry felt it was insulting. I'm pretty sure "don't bite the hand that feeds you" was an exact quote from a state official demanding it be taken down immediately.

Get ready to read a bunch of posts from people who pride themselves on being scientific, but reject a theory that enjoys more support in climatology than the Standard Model does in physics

There is no "theory of climate change" to reject. There are dozens of different hypotheses, and people advancing political action switch what they call that theory according to what argument they want to make. To deconstruct this:

(1) Human activity has raised the level of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere beyond what it would otherwise be. [Uncontroversial]

(3) Human activity has contributed to some degree to that increase. [mostly accepted]

(4) Human activity is the primary cause of temperature increase over the 20th century. [unproven]

(5) Human activity will result in temperature increases in the 21st century that are larger than those experienced in the 20th century. [unproven, speculative]

(6) Temperature increase in the 21st century will have devastating consequences for humans. [highly speculative, controversial]

(7) Government intervention now can reduce temperature increases in the 21st century significantly. [highly speculative, completely implausible]

So, the only thing that scientists agree on are (1-3). The rest is unproven, speculative, and often implausible. But without (4-7), observations (1-3) simply aren't worth teaching in school. And activists and politicians promoting government action like to pretend that agreement on (1-3) implies agreement on (4-7).

And in terms of politics, I used to be a solid Democrat. But digging into the science behind climate change (and then some other issues where Democrats like to talk about science) has made me an independent, because Democrats are abusing science for political purposes. They like to pick some half-ass scientific result that fits their agenda, try to use it to get people riled up to vote for them or transfer billions into the coffers of their corporate buddies, and accuse anybody who disagrees with their political agenda as "unscientific". Just like you did.

Let's be clear: like most scientists, I agree with what is actually the agreed upon theory of climate change, namely points (1-3). But that's all science supports right now; the rest is speculation and politics.

No, my links show that scientists understand the difference between correlation and causation. Here's another document by the National Academy of Sciences [nas-sites.org] which may interest anyone who actually wants to understand the science. See page 5.

Not really, economic theory is, and has been, completely lacking any kind of consensus. About practically anything. What we've seen up to 2008 was the worship of one particular cult of economic theory because it was so damned convenient. There were plenty of economists crying murder about it. And they still are. Contrast this with climate science. It must be very frustrating for the US population that there are not two schools of thought on the issues, allowing them to pick the one that's most convenient an

But the whole thing is: these models were and are pretty much correct. Simply, rates cannot go below zero (they can, and this is called a tax on capital and is apparently politically impossible in the US, so they can't). Many people forgot to consider what happens if rates hit the zero lower bound.

But people who did wonder about that found exactly what is happening now.

Beware people who will not trust models to their limits: they might be worried about the validity of the model, but in many cases are afrai

A 19th century survey of 12000 towns would've yielded an even more astonishingly high percentage of citizens with god-belief.

The science is more widely accepted by the folks who have the time to pay attention, but for the most part, it's a propaganda scheme that headlines enough opposition theory to leave the average billpayer some room for doubt.

Funding opposition studies is just a business expense for large companies engaged in controversial industry.

I think hes making the basic point that the hivemind can be wrong, and "everyone thinks this" is not always the best argument for something. Heck, hundreds of millions also thought communism was the way forward, that doesnt make it right.

Its not as simple as "theres data", either, because the data existing, being interpreted properly, and being known are entirely different things.

Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.

It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.

Its too bad you learned from these new standards which pride itself on the band-wagon approach to science where the most popular theory is heralded as the correct theory and any other competing theories are dismissed out of hand.

"It might be bad for the coal industry" is not a competing theory on the cause of the present climate change.

But natural causes is...and if you are not teaching children that the warming could very well be simply natural warming than you are not teaching them the scientific method which tells us that the null hypothesis is always assumed to be true until its proven false.

Yes, but as David Hume would point out. The preponderance of evidence of apples falling from trees doesn't *prove* that gravity is real, just that its incredibly unlikely that its not.

We're at that point with man made climate change. We know that if CO2 doesn't trap IR heat, nearly 140 years of physics needs to be turfed, we know that we've put in a certain amount of CO2 that outstrips by a huge margin any natural source, and that x amount of CO2 will introduce Y amount of energy into the climate system. We can do rudimentary models that show a general trend and lately we've been doing more complex models track a more specific trend with astonishing accuracy when applied to historical data.

The odds of human induced climate change being wrong are so low that its simply not up for debate anymore in the sciences, just as evolution or gravity isn't because that would be silly.

The fact that outside of the sciences a lot of people seem to think theres scientific controversy isn't really important here.

Science isn't a democracy, its a dictatorship of evidence. And the evidence is in. AGW is real.

No, you do your homework. Natural sources are huge, but so are natural sinks. Without the human contribution, they would balance each other out. Human CO2 production is tipping the scale, year after year after year.

How would they balance each other out? The climate on earth has been seesawing wildly between freezing cold and baking heat since the earth had a climate. There is no "natural balance".

While clearly we and every other living creature are having an effect on the climate, the question always has been "how much of an effect". In any case within a century or so we'll have moved to pretty much entirely renewable sources, most likely making inroads on solar satellites as well, so er, everyone calm down I guess.

We have three classes of CO2 sources. The natural seasonal variations in the carbon cycle do, yes, dwarf human and volcanic emissions, and yet the last have still been able to drastically alter the climate historically. Compared to volcanism, humans are still a couple of orders of magnitude away from the largest periods of volcanic activity in the Earth's history, but those periods lasted millions of years, and "a couple orders of magnitude away" means that in 1000 years at the current rate we will have equ

One of the big problems here is that everyone feels the need to have a strong opinion on this, and often use websites-- which are terribly poor sources. I could find as many sources that contridict that, that say that the solar system is geocentric, etc etc.

Notably, a website with a non-neutral name like that is going to tend to be a particularly poor source; it very obviously has a bias and skin in the game, so regardless of whether it is posting true things or not it cant be considered credible.

Models are only a success on their training data, they have failed at predicting the future at every step

Wrong. These aren't Neural networks , and they aren't "trained". They are a simulation of understood physics that thus-far matches the historical data and is so far actually predicting things quite well (Although some of the earlier models where a bit conservative due to not accounting for permafrost).

What you are calling "training" , in science is called "Hind-casting" and its a standard method of testing scientific theories where we can't feasibly do experiments (other than the usual CO2 in lab type stuff from the 1870s when we first started talking about climate change from CO2).

If you disregard it, you have to throw away *so much* science. Why would you want to do that? Its a tried and tested methodology responsible for a huge amount of what we know about the natural sciences.

I suspect a lot of AGW denialists are also Evolution deniers, and it's worth noting that a lot of the testing process for Evolution involves 'hind-casting' rather than forecasting. Every time we point to the fossil record, after all, we are looking behind, not forward. The same is true for Cosmology, and it's worth noting that growth in "Big Bang denialism" also seems to be happening, with a high (although far from universal) correlation. I'm wating for some people to start denouncing Contenental Drift as a liberal plot.

You're right, it isn't. But that's not all the IPCC or the national curriculum say. They also say that climate change will be huge and have devastating consequences, and that's unproven. It isn't even a question physics can answer.

Actually they don't say that. The IPCC presents a set of weighted possibilities based on statistical analysis of the results of a few thousand research projects. These range from "Things could get a bit hairy for agriculture and fisheries" (Which is already happening) to "Shit goes completely haywire, were screwed.". The IPCC reports tend to lean towards the low end severity however increasingly climate researchers have been critical if the IPCC for under reporting just how serious some of the models predictions are.

Physics actually can answer it to some degree , although perhaps not in the detail we like. The equasions are not hard. You look at solar inputs over time, then look at CO2 (and methane, etc) and you can say "This will trap x amount of infra red energy". This part can be calculated quite accurately since is an entirely deterministic calculation.Then you look at a range of possibilities from "All this heat is converted to kinetic energy (storms/cyclones/etc)" to "All this heat turns into heat (greenhouse effect)". Remember , conservation of energy, the heat has to do *something*.

Of course I'm simplifying it a little bit here and not including run-away effects from permafrost which sadly appear to be starting already according to many arctic field researchers (Ie permafrost areas where methane has started to bubble up) which potentially can turn the whole thing psychotic on us, but thats the basics of it.

But natural causes is...and if you are not teaching children that the warming could very well be simply natural warming than you are not teaching them the scientific method

Luckily for us, there's an organisation dedicated to reviewing the best data that scientific studies have to offer, with contributions from thousands of practising scientists all over the world collected over more than 25 years. Let's see what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say:

Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.

...

Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes (see [data citations]). This evidence for human influence has grown since [the previous IPCC Assessment Report]. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.

...

Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

Just to be clear, those quotations are directly from the highlighted key points in the sections about attributing the detected changes in the climate and what will happen in the future. The emphasis was retained from the original publication.

I'll leave you with one more quote, from a slightly less heavyweight source but no less valid:

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Natural variation is not noise. They are two different things, noise in climate data is typically the data which results from high temperature records for instance, or low temperature records. The noise typically cancels out over a long enough time period. Natural variation is simply the opposite of human caused warming for instance. Its the planet naturally heating up or cooling down through its own dynamic systems, from the oceans to the ocean cycles to weather systems to even ENSO and other part of o

the first graph shows that the CO2 level has hovered between 200 and 300ppm for 500k years. so our current co2 concentration ~400ppm is unprecedented in the history of mankind! The graph also shows that global temperature is highly correlated with CO2 concentration.

the second graph shows that for most of the past millennium the CO2 level has been hovering at 290 ppm, which is consistent with the past. But in the past 100 years it steadily shot upwards! My conclusion is that this is strong evidence that CO2 increases are due to the large scale burning of fossil fuels that began with the industrial revolution and kept going until today. my further conclusion is that if we reduce our CO2 emissions we can bring the CO2 concentrations back to historical levels.

this is my conclusion; you may look at the same evidence and come to the same conclusion. But the important thing is to teach our children the critical thinking skills to evaluate this data. If you white wash science classes then you lose the chance to develop these skills.

Well current temperatures have fallen below the 95% confidence band of the climate models predictions, so most reasonable scientists would say the hypothesis has been falsified on that basis; now that doesn't prove that GW is or isn't happening, it just proves the climate models are full of shit. Now that is not a surprise to anyone who has any formal training in Fortran and has looked at the source code. Even the input data is a horrific mess, little of it meets it's own data and formatting definitions.

Really? So, Anonymous Coward knows better than NASA and NOAA and the UN Panel on Cliamate Change? Oh, wait, maybe you don't have any f-ing clue what you're talking about, and the effects of Man-made climate change are radically different than natural variation.

Here's the thing, as you post on Slashdot, I'm going to assume you troubleshoot problems. Maybe it's network infrastructure, maybe it's software, maybe it's server administration. I don't know. But, do you really consider a problem "fixed" if you don't know the cause? If errors are getting thrown everywhere, do you apply band-aid fixes that "seem to work" but you don't know why? I do know those guys. You know what? They're fucking terrible at their jobs. Real troubleshooting is learning the root cause and fixing it. Even if you can't fix the root error directly, if you don't have a real understanding of it, you never know if your band-aids are gong to work.

When someone says "well who cares if it's man-made" or "it's really the alarmists that are the problem" or whatever, it's just another attempt to sow doubt on a model that is just as predictive as Evolution. It matters what caused it, because that influences how you fix it - for instance, if it's man-made, moving off coal power plants to solar, nuclear, wind, etc, is a huge help. So get a clue, stop sticking your head in the sand and changing the subject, and realize that man-made climate change is radically different than natural variation. Idiot.

Proper science (like in a science that has a validated, reasonable precise model of reality) is not indoctrination. The dismal science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org] on the other hand...

1) Who needs a computer model when you can see the polar ice melting. Yes, its really melting - go see it for yourself it you don't believe it. Strike up a friendship with somebody in Iceland if you disagree and ask them what they are seeing.
2) Who cares, the house is on fire. Let's not waste time arguing about how it got started.
3) We only have one earth so there will be no control group or second chance. You don't need to be a medical doctor to know that a self inflicted gunshot wound is a bad idea. You don't need to be a climate scientist to see that the global climate is changing and that the logical explanation is mankind's burning of fossil fuel. The time for skepticism has passed.
4) The data has been readily available and its being ignored. Our innocent descendants need to be protected from the selfishness of our generation and the previous two or three. Even if global warming is a hoax, is it fair that our generation uses more than its fair share of the planet's resources so a few super rich multinational corporations can get super richer?
5-9) See #2

The vast majority of free thinkers who have reviewed the data agree that man is having an unprecedented impact on the atmosphere and the ocean. For better or worse we are reshaping the climate and there will winners and losers. The losers are innocent people and wildlife who cannot adapt to the changes and our descendants left with a planet stripped of its resources.

If we want to be selfish and immoral - fine - let's just don't be a hypocrites about it. As we all pump gas into our cars and adjust our thermostats we should recognize there are consequences of our actions.

North polar ice is indeed diminishing. South polar ice is increasing. You phrase this as if to suggest both are melting. It is a lie. Start with an obvious lie and nothing else in your post can be taken seriously.

"Increasing" or "decreasing" mean nothing without some kind of quantity. For instance, the greenland ice sheet (arctic) is melting at a rate of 367 Gt/year between 2008 and 2012 [wikipedia.org] which dwarfs antarctica's meager increase of 33Gt/year [wikipedia.org].

If the climate scientists' models are not validated (i.e. they fail to predict real world evolution) then you have a good case for not teaching them in school at all or just mentioning them as (invalidated) hypotheses. Also, for consistency, thou shalt also remove the dismal science (economics) from academic curricula, as it never came up with any working model, not even remotely close to a coarse "engineering" 10% accuracy.

Economics allows you to make reasonable predictions about supply, demand, and value, and it is applicable to almost everything, even things not necessarily related to money

You mean like those predictions made by the top economists at Lehman Brothers etc? La creme de la creme?

Now seriously. Value is dealt with by some individuals called actuaries not economists. Supply & demand is bogus as is most of any Econ101 based on "free market" theories. There's a nice, well documented book "Debunking Economics" by Steve Keen that makes this point more eloquently that I could ever try.

As for psychology, I would rather compare economics as a science with psychiatry, especially at the level where it was some 50 years ago. They didn't have any understanding of how the human brain works, but they kept prescribing electric shocks, cold showers and lobotomies. Is the patient apathetic? Let's apply some "stimulus" (high voltage preferred). Is he too agitated now? Let's "tapper off" (cold shower) and give him some "austerity" (lobotomy). Wow, see, now he's not banging his head into the walls anymore, we CURED him! Rinse and repeat! What a great science we have here!

It's all about me! me!! me!! and screw the consequences, especially for the environment, our grandkids, or poor people.

Indeed - though I wonder why, if they feel that the science side is too one-sided (not sure how that works out, as long as it's science), they wouldn't simply counter with a new program in social studies / economics. Surely they can convince the kids that, yes, coal is a horrible pollutant - but considering it employs their daddy, uncle, aunt, Bob, John and Mary, and brings in $xB to the

You misunderstand the scope of the problem. The issue is that there is a very real risk that we might be headed towards a global extinction event. Which no amount of money is worth enough to compensate for.

Further, it is a "risk" because it is a future event. But at this point it is also a very highly probable one. And you talk about religion, which is probably one of the root of the problem: too many people refuse to consider the risk because religion.

You misunderstand the scope of the problem. The issue is that there is a very real risk that we might be headed towards a global extinction event.

For some species, possibly, although species are going extinct all the time for various reasons and there is little we can do about most of them. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is not at risk of extinction in even the direst of CO2-based climate projections.

If you think "it's clear that solar and wind are our future" then you have either a poor understanding of the energy needs of our current civilization, or you have a very long view of "our future." Certainly solar/wind and deep geothermal are in "our" future, bu

Last time we had the kind of temperatures we are heading for, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Normally, organisms have millions of years to adapt to these kind of changes. This is how we are headed to an extinction event.

Wyoming is an extremely conservative state. It comes from being mostly rural; the state has only about 582,000 people and its population density is the second-lowest of all US states. Per Wikipedia, it also receives more tax dollars per-capita than any state but Alaska, and its per-capita tax aid is more than double the US average,/and/ its taxes are among the lowest of all states because they can suck Uncle Sam's teat to make up the difference.

Nice misinformation here. The situation _is_ catastrophic. We _are_ in big trouble. Do not mistake the insane German policies [1] for a model of how things happen when you want to curb CO_2. The climatologists know very well how bad the situation is. Simply, it is so bad that they realise at this point people are not willing to listen to the truth, so they _minimise_ the risks.

[1] We would like solar, but really, we need energy, and since our crazy greens won't allow nuclear, we go for coal.

This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.

As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.

This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.

As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.

You're getting your misattributions wrong. The phrase "useful idiots" wasn't misattributed to Stalin, it was misattributed to Lenin. That is easily verified now that the reference book, They Never Said It, is on Google books. http://books.google.com/books?... [google.com] Of course there's always Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Starting to depart a bit from the topic, but 'useful idiot' is not an invention of America's Glenn Beck. It dates at least back to Russia in the 1940's, and then developed generally as a term to generally characterize 'fellow traveler' socialists who were not themselves communists but were willing dupes of communists.

Not everything in this universe is an invention of American left or right wingers.

That said, I find the GP's attitude of "no such thing as catastrophic man-made global warming" coupled with his sarcasm to be as unhelpful as your ahistorical claim. He may well be right that there is no such thing; if climate sensitivity is on the low end of current IPCC estimates, then a reasonable person could argue that means the results will not be catastrophic in a global sense, and attribution will make any specific weather disaster tough to pin on anthropogenic climate change. But to blithely assert that it therefore doesn't exist? I'll definitely pass on that assertion.

...should a lawyer get to determine the science curriculum? Shouldn't it be, you know, people who are educated in science that decide the science curriculum? (yes, that was rhetorical, I know damn well what the answer is)

The "scientific method" is a way to verify what is true. The set of observations Humanity has accumulated across the millennia and the theories that explain how these observations mesh together _is_ Science.

And it is very much something you have to learn to build upon and further your understanding. Science education is no oxymoron, you simply misunderstand what is Science.

As someone who believes in climate change, I'm growing very uneasy with the language being used by both sides to describe dissenting opinions. It feels like the biggest threat we'll face in the future is not a changing environment, but one another.

As someone who is certain about his own observations about climate change- the real problem is playing the blame game. Assumptions about cause have obscured the effect to the point that we can no longer deal with the effect politically because everybody is too busy pointing fingers about the cause.

With the melting of the tundra 10 years ago, we hit a tipping point, it became too late to stop climate change. It is now a positive feedback loop. You could remove every human being from the planet, and global

Of the 4 routes out of my area, all of them require driving 100+ miles before you reach another major town (as defined as having more than 1 gas station and a post office that opens atleast an hour a day).

Roughly two-thirds of the coal-fired electricity generated in Wyoming is consumed in other states. It's hard to blame just Wyoming when Oregon finds it cheaper to burn coal in Wyoming and transmit electricity than to ship Wyoming coal and burn it in Oregon.

Yep.. that's what you get when you let corporations pay for the politicians bills.They are owned by industry and will never side with the People they are supposedly there to represent.. which they are not.Democracy is dead in the US.. rather.. it never existed. All an illusion.

I question why climate science needs to be part of the standards at all. It seems weirdly specific. When so many kids leave high school not knowing what an electron is, I'd say there are other areas where we might focus our pedagogical effort.

1. Warming is happening.
2. CO2 concentration is atypically high.
3. CO2 concentration is atypically high due to man-made emissions.
4. CO2 concentration has some upward effect on global temperature.

However, he also holds these beliefs:

1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.
2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.
3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.
4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.
5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,
6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.

I would say your skeptic friend is very astute (I am not a climate change skeptic). His point #6 is the salient one and probably immutable. So just as the climatologists can say with high probability that the climate will change as we pump CO2 into the air, the political scientists can say with high probability that the world governments (or anyone else) aren't going to do anything to slow it down significantly. Both may be inconvenient truths but inconvenience doesn't reduce the probability of being acc

Curiously, your friend believes "The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.", but is certain that "There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming."

This seems like wishful thinking. If we really don't have a good handle on the severity of global warming then it is just as likely that the impacts will be much greater than anticipated.

Regarding the costs of mitigating, all published economists agree that it is cheaper to mitigate than to accept the impacts of climate change, and the sooner we start mitigating the cheaper it will be.

1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.

Argument from disbelief.

2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.

If he believes that (1) is true how can he know that (2) is true.

3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.

Argument from disbelief again.

4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.

But 1 and 2 are contradictory

5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,

The real point - he doesn't want to do something, so it's impossible to do anything, so there is nothing that need to be done.

6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.

The final proof that he is arguing backwards from what he wants to happen (or not happen) to what he wants to be true.

Deniers! Start from the science! Don't start from your personal feelings and work back to the science, that's not how it's done.

The question isn't whether "CO2 causes warming" but whether a change from 290 to 330 ppm in the troposphere can be the cause of a measurable change in the heat content of troposphere.

Well, we blew past 330 ppm in the 1960's and are now at 400 ppm. That causes a direct forcing (not including feedbacks) of 5.35*ln(400/280)W/m^2 or about 1.9 W/m^2. For comparison, the output from the sun fluctuates by as much as 1 W/m^2 every 11 years. CO2 is now causing a forcing that is double the increase in solar forcing - but the CO2 forcing is constant while the solar forcing only peaks once every 11 years.

Here is what the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry says: "Greenhouse gases (CO2, O3, CFC) absorb infra-red radiation from the surface of the Earth and trap the heat in the troposphere. If this absorption is really strong, the greenhouse gas blocks most of the outgoing infra-red radiation close to the Earth's surface. This means that only a small amount of outgoing infra-red radiation reaches carbon dioxide in the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere. On the other hand, carbon dioxide emits heat radiation, which is lost from the stratosphere into space. In the stratosphere, this emission of heat becomes larger than the energy received from below by absorption and, as a result, there is a net energy loss from the stratosphere and a resulting cooling." - http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/e... [atmosphere.mpg.de]

We're talking about public schools. Run by the government, at some level or another. So if "political debate" means "debate taking place in the context of government" then what they teach will always be a political debate.

You got one thing right. The state is evil. And by state I mean the government itself, not Wyoming per se.

If, in order to solve this problem, the liberty and freedom of the people in Wyoming to run their own lives and government needs to be sacrificed, then I will never agree with your "solution" to this problem.

If we must give our liberty in order to survive, then count me as your enemy. What good is life without liberty?

Oh and your all powerful government you require to solve this problem, if it's at

The testing part is missing; the repeatable testability by independent parties of an hypothesis

This bullshit again? What do you call the adaptation of climate models over time to better fit recorded data again? I suggest you pay attention yourself instead of regurgitating shit vomited up by some intern in a political office. I'd say you already know more about the topic than that court jester who kicked off the "testing part is missing" as a talking point based on some half remembered high school science

"The testing part is missing; the repeatable testability by independent parties of an hypothesis."

Say what? All of the scientists/science teams studying this issue are independent parties testing the hypothesis - that's what science is and how it works. It is a process of continual repeatable testing of the hypothesis.

What is your concept of this "missing outside party"? A new "super science" that mysteriously needs to be created to address this one issue because, as you admit, it is politically inconvenient for Wyoming?

Wyoming may not be "politically correct" on the issue, but they are correct that "global warming" being caused primarily by man-made emissions isn't settled science. (And no, computer scientists are not the correct scientists.;) )

The rest of your post is full of baloney that is readily refuted, but it's a tedious and probably hopeless job so I'll just pick on one statement: "The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concedes for the first time that global temperatures have not risen since 1998."

This is outright dishonest. 1998 was, at the time, the hottest year ever in the instrumental record by a *long* shot. It r